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Slightly larger than life-size, a stone statue from Canopus in the third century B.C. wears a dress typical of
Ptolemaic queens. Given the association of those women with Isis, the knot in the fabric is o en called an
Isis knot. For the Ptolemies, the relationship between Isis and her brother-husband, Osiris, was a model for
royal marriages. Her cult endured for 500 years a er the death of Cleopatra, one of her devoted followers.
than a thousand objects have been recovered,
200 of them considered significant: pottery,
coins, gold jewelry, the broken heads of statues
(probably smashed by early Christians). An im-
portant discovery was a large cemetery outside
the temple walls, suggesting that the subjects of a
monarch wished to be buried near royal remains.
Yet the tomb of Cleopatra still hovers out of
reach, like a tantalizing mirage, and the theory of
who is buried at Taposiris Magna still rests more
on educated speculation than on facts. Might
not Cleopatra's reign have unraveled too quickly
for her to build such a secret tomb? A fantastic
story, like a horse with wings, ies in the face of
the principle of parsimony. But it's a long hard
haul from not-yet-proved to disproved.
Critics of Martinez's theory point out that it
is rare in archaeology for someone to announce
they are going to nd something and then actu-
ally nd it. " ere is no evidence that Cleopatra
tried to hide her grave, or would have wanted
to," says Duane Roller, a respected Cleopatra
scholar. "It would have been hard to hide it from
Octavian, the very person who buried her. All
the evidence is that she was buried with her
ancestors. e material associated with her at
Taposiris Magna is not meaningful because ma-
terial associated with her can be found in many
places in Egypt."
"I agree that Octavian knew and authorized
the place where she was buried," Martinez says.
"But what I believe---and it is only a theory---
is that after the mummification process was
complete, the priests at Taposiris Magna bur-
ied the bodies of Cleopatra and Mark Antony
in a di erent place without the approval of the
Romans, a hidden place beneath the courtyard
of the temple."
If Cleopatra's tomb is ever found, the archaeo-
logical sensation would be rivaled only by How-
ard Carter's unearthing of the tomb of King Tut
in 1922. But will nding her tomb, not to say her
body itself, deepen our portrait of the last Egyp-
tian pharaoh? On one hand, how could it not? In
the last hundred years about the only new addi-
tion to the archaeological record is what scholars
believe is a fragment of Cleopatra's handwriting:
a scrap of papyrus granting a tax exemption to a
Roman citizen in Egypt in 33 . .
On the other hand, maybe nding her tomb
would diminish what Shakespeare called "her
in nite variety." Disembodied, at large in the
realm of myth, more context than text, Cleopa-
tra is free to be of di erent character to di er-
ent times, which may be the very wellspring of
her vitality. No other gure from antiquity seems
so versatile in her ambiguities, so modern in
her contradictions.
It was lunch hour at the dig site, and the workers
had gone to eat in the shade. We were sitting on top
of the temple pylon in the radiance of noon, staring
out at the sea beyond. ere was a feeling of still-
ness in the air, an inkling of eternity, as if the old
Egyptian gods were about---Re, who ruled over the
earth, sky, and the underworld, and Isis, who saved
Osiris by tricking Re into revealing his secret name.
e search for Cleopatra has come at no small
cost to Martinez. She gave up her thriving law
practice in Santo Domingo and poured much
of her savings into her quest. She moved to an
apartment in Alexandria, where she has begun
studying Arabic. But it's not an easy life, far from
her family and friends. During the revolution
earlier this year, she was confronted by a group
of aggressive men as she worked at the excava-
tion site. For now, work at the site is on hold. She
hopes to return in the fall.
"I believe we are going to find what we are
looking for," she says. " e di erence is now we're
digging in the ground, not in books." j
"STATUE OF A QUEEN," THIRD CENTURY B.C.; KENNETH GARRETT
If Cleopatra's tomb is found,
the archaeological sensation
would be rivaled only by
Howard Carter's unearthing
of King Tut in . But will it
deepen our understanding of
Egypt's last pharaoh?